On the basis of 572 examples taken from seven million-word corpora of written English the present study—which complements the spoken data-based studies of Oberlander & Delin (1996) and Weinert & Miller (1996)— explores the relationship between information structure and discourse role with reversed what-dzfts. The study confirms the typically summative, internal-referencing, and stage-ending-roles of the informational type upon which previous studies have concentrated (the statistically dominant type, with minimally informative highlighted element and relative clause). A second type observed by Oberlander & Delin (1996), with an ‘informative presupposition’ or ‘comment clause’, is found to occur stage-medially rather than as an ending, and furthermore to have a ‘pivotal’ (both backward-and forward-looking) discourse role. Two further types of reversed what-cleft with an informationally new highlighted element are identified. Both can occur stage-initially, and share some similarities with basic what-clefts and it-clefts in their discourse behaviour.

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